Long-term Grantmaking Can Move the Needle

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Giving Compass’ Take:

• In this story, Etan Vlessing interviews Cecilia Conrad of the MacArthur Foundation about how to improve the grantmaking process.

• Conrad claims that there are philanthropists who “can’t give away their money fast enough,” yet there are still so many underfunded organizations. How can organizations improve their pitch and outreach to become connected with these philanthropists?

The way Cecilia Conrad of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation tells it, there are many philanthropists with untold wealth on the sidelines while worthy charitable organizations striving for social change go unnoticed or under-resourced.

Samaritanmag talked to Conrad about taking big bets on charitable organizations and matching them with wealthy philanthropists willing to tackle social issues radically different in scale, scope, and complexity — and how to do all that through a rigorous, open and transparent process.

You mention there are philanthropists who can’t give away their money fast enough. Which means so much wealth is being kept on the sidelines as worthy charities without proper messaging or scale struggle to achieve social change. So are you really in the match-making business?

We’re asking philanthropists who have become our partners to make a minimum commitment of $10 million, and to make that as a multi-year grant, because we do want to give organizations the ability to think bigger than they have been able to do in the past. And then we’re prepared to support them as they consider how to think bigger. Because if you’ve always had to do with $1 million here and $1 million there, you’ve not been able to step back and come up with, “What if I had $10 million, or $15 million or $100 million? How would I deploy that and how would I implement that?” So we’re providing support to the organizations and we’re matching organizations with funders who are willing to step up.

What are the questions to weigh when pursuing scale for social impact?

There’s scaling where the single organization gets larger. There’s scaling where you bring on other partners. There’s scaling where you need to consider how to adapt what you’re doing to a new population … The space and opportunity to [ask these questions] is important. And you need patience to be able to work with organizations to define interim milestones that a philanthropist or a donor feels comfortable with to measure progress over time.

Giving Compass' Take:
• Nonprofits have to take diversity and inclusion into serious consideration and call out the foundations and organizations that are not helping reduce barriers between communities in order to advance social progress.
• How have diversity and inclusion practices changed over time? How are they more complex and active now?
• Read about some insights to trends of D&I practices in regard to sustainability.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are three words perpetually bound together in our modern lexicon to convey the ideal components of a fair and just society. In theory, they provide a worthwhile blueprint for removing bias and privilege from our collective experience, but a blueprint can take us only so far—realization of this goal will require daily introspection and vigilance in our external interactions to check and recalibrate our motives.
In theory, inclusion is the active and ongoing engagement with diversity in a manner that ensures that perspectives are valued and needs are understood. It is a social remedy that exists to counteract the injustices of systematic exclusion, diminished access, and devaluation of diversity experienced by many in our society.
Nonprofit leaders and advocates must be especially vigilant to ensure that this restrictive form of inclusion does not infiltrate and undermine our collective social justice goals. In fact, we must radically reframe what it means to be inclusive: moving beyond opening doors of access, to providing tools for the marginalized to knock the sequestered doors of privilege off their hinges.
When used effectively, foundations can provide the resources, programmatic support, and access to power structures that will bring us closer to realizing a society that thrives in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But a new generation of advocates must emerge—one that is more teachable, and unafraid to have uncomfortable conversations that challenge the very foundations of our work in communities. We must be a generation unwavering in our resolve to use our agency to apply collective pressure to institutional barriers that seek to divide us. We must be a generation with the profound understanding that a just and open society is something that we across the spectrum of humanity owe each other.
Read the full article about nonprofit diversity and inclusion by Antonesia Wiley at Nonprofit Quarterly.

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